Wednesday 20 June 2001 09.15 EDT
First published on Wednesday 20 June 2001 09.15 EDT

After the velvet words come the barbed warnings. When they held their mini-summit in Slovenia at the weekend, George Bush and Mr Putin gushed over each other. Mr Bush praised Mr Putin as honest and straightforward and invited the Russian leader to his ranch. Mr Putin called Mr Bush a "nice man".

But Mr Putin revealed a steelier side in an interview with American newspapers yesterday. He said that Russia would add extra warheads to its missiles if the US pushed ahead with missile defence. If America ditched the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty, Mr Putin went on, Russia would tear up the Start I and Start II treaties that have whittled down American and Russian warheads over the years.

Ripping up the treaties would bring disarmament to a grinding halt. Russia would be left with 3,500 warheads at the end of the decade instead of the 1,000 to 1,500 warheads envisaged under the draft Start III treaty. The US would also lose the right to monitor and verify Russian disarmament sites.

The abrupt change of tone from the lovefest in Slovenia may well be grandstanding on Mr Putin's part - to show his domestic audience that he was no patsy for the Americans. Russia may be enfeebled, dependent on IMF handouts, overrun by mafia chieftains, but it clings on to pretensions of grandeur. Thanks to its 6,000 nuclear warheads, Moscow retains some semblance of big-power status.

Yet in threatening to unleash a new arms race, Mr Putin is guilty of double-think. He ridiculed missile defence, saying it was trying to hit a bullet with a bullet, and that it would not work. But if that is the case, why bother with countermeasures like adding warheads to existing missiles? Mr Putin may like to think that tweaking Russia's missiles would cost a "meagre sum", but given the state of Russia's parlous finances, Russia can ill afford such expenses, no matter how meagre.

In many ways, the fact that missile defence may be a $60bn white elephant is irrelevant to Russia and China. Missile defence may not work, but for Moscow and Beijing, it symbolises America's desire to impose its will on others. As they see it, they feel duty-bound to resist American "hegemony".

In their view, missile defence represents a unilateral effort to rip apart a consensus on arms control that has been built up painstakingly over the years. That consensus, mutually assured destruction, may indeed be mad, but it also brought about stability, and the Start treaties were a way of unwinding that madness. Missile defence threatens to take the world backwards.

That missile defence may prove unworkable is also irrelevant for the Bush administration. The American political commentator, William Pfaff, argues that it is more important for a missile programme to exist than that for the missiles work as far as Washington is concerned.

In this context, missile defence is America's version of national industrial policy. It is a way of shovelling money into development and research that will keep America ahead technologically, especially in aerospace, and if there are civilian spin-offs, fine. As for the threats from rogue states and bogeymen like Osama bin Laden, they are just flimsy pretexts to justify the project.

Mr Putin has now rattled his sabre with his warning of a new arms race. But he should cool it. In time, Russia, China - and Europe too - could even learn to love missile defence.

Instead of hectoring the Americans, world leaders should just let the US get on with throwing its money down the drain on a scheme that is destined to fail, according to most experts.

The US is going ahead with missile defence, whether the world likes it or not. So we should sit back and enjoy the show in the sky as the rockets miss each other. After all, that is what has happened for the most part in missile defence tests so far.